Down to brass, the point: We sat on divanspointing across wallpapered rooms to each other,

one hand a flute, one a crook, shades up high to the brow as shielding from gas lamps.

A hiss through quiet, we traded accusationsas the body grew chilled on the carpet.

A lizard scuttled at a diagonal and the cameraneeds film. The reel clacked and someone coughed.

This is what I mean by your psyche in mineown image. This is what I see when you turn

out the light. This is when we realize we are mirror images with similar algorithms.

This is where we are when we stop looking.This is where we part again for never meeting.

And this is what’s left for me to say to you: If I find out you lied to me, you’re a dead man.

The Dream

Wonder mumbles or something like I like that, there.Dusky imprecision flaunts the better half like charmLinks reticence to daze—all the jokes saving all the lonelyMilitant hi there. You’re something, not charming, and whyTake up hands against? The dreams come back: black Escalades,Spray of knuckles through tint. Go forward, go forward, We can’t be sure though hear that hiss? Residual lineTap exhale or breeze amongst poplars, cherry blossoms.Registers a sigh of slow surveillance. The dreams comeBack of everyone set to play in the wings and hush.The empty amphitheater, trickle mist through slats meantFor off-gas. The swamp leaves trails to us all and the flagsSignal forward, we are dispersed. My heart’s homesteadA reckoning, fogged pier. What to make of the monumentsLighted like jewelry and just as warm. The hand does not reachAcross for all its waiting, anticipation mistake, for naught,Smoke screen no screen after all. The rivers cut everything off.Black Escalade, go forward. In the steady, slow humidity, everythingI love shudders off.

Midwestern (Metal Made Temper)

Objects alchemize or metal to a shrift, catchingFull aversion in dust pile-up, sandstorm bubblingThrough the window, reluctance virtue in the sunSetting, a wilder population come to root out evil.The comet roving closer, elliptical firestorm—too easyIn worship, the farmhouse a perfect frame absorbingDestruction’s dispatch. Give up that face already.No notice, tawny portraiture from the butcher’s bedCasts a pale in the striped hallway, perhaps a pailFor harrowing night flames, gaslit in mercurial mirroredGlass. Darkens. Hear it? Rumble low through the yearlings,Poised in up-sniff ready, flashed out at second glance.A glacier’s timeline re-sketched in gale, crops kneelTo the word. This is what the rocking chair moves for,Wildly unnatural, chains in the cellar strung for airlock.Do we know what it is to drape, to frame? Fuller biding,Fuller menace, sepia web vibrates a full minute beforeHalting like a charm. The lake shrugs, pulls back, opensIts center like all the plain’s throat. Full minutes inArriving, generous acceptance, sea-like provisionsIn a kind-of-sail churning power, halting current, Rustling stalks, stopped. Just the rumble. You see it, Come closer.

Thea Brown is the author of Famous Times (H_NGM_N, 2018), Think of the Danger(H_NGM_N, 2016), and the chapbook We Are Fantastic (Petri Press, 2013). Her poems can be found in Bennington Review, Oversound, LitHub, and elsewhere. She lives in Baltimore, where she was the 2016–2017 Tickner Fellow at the Gilman School and a 2016 Rubys Artist Project Grant awardee.